Foresight "Group Genius" Weekend

Leaping the Abyss:

Putting Group Genius to Work

Further Reading

In 1977, the Taylors compiled a list of 500
books that contributed to the basic foundation of their first management
center. Books have always been an integral part of the DesignShop environment.
Here is a short list to get you started.

Environment

Years of extensive research has yielded archetypal language-pattern
language-for design of environmental elements ranging from communities
and open spaces, to buildings, to areas such as window seats; use of this
language gives lay people a practical application of architectural principles.

Alexander, Christopher. A Timeless Way
of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

This new theory of architecture uncovers the patterns which bring a
room, neighborhood, town, city, or region to life and give it unique identity.

Buildings improve with time-if they're allowed. Brand shows how to work
with time rather than against it.

Hall, Edward T. Hidden Dimension.
New York: Anchor Books, 1990.

Hall introduces the science of proxemics to demonstrate how our use
of space can affect personal and business relations, cross-cultural interactions,
architecture, city planning, and urban renewal.

Hiss, Tony. The Experience of Place:
A Completely New Way of Looking At and Dealing With Our Radically Changing
Cities and Countryside. New York: Knopf, 1990.

"Simultaneous perception" allows our surroundings to disturb
or soothe us as we engage in our tasks; computer simulations can determine
the effect of simultaneous perception and aid in careful urban planning
which will allow our environments to enrich the lives of future generations.

Organizational Strategy

Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long
View: Paths to Strategic Insight for Yourself and Your Company. New
York: Doubleday, 1996.

How to use scenario planning for developing strategic vision, navigating
the future.

Stack, Jack with Bo Burlingham, ed. The
Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company. New
York: Doubleday Currency, 1992.

Employee teams will focus and perform best if they perform like owners-with
full information on the business including all financial matters.

Wing, R. L. The Art of Strategy: A New
Translation of Sun Tzu's Classic, The Art of War. New York: Doubleday,
1988.

The fifty-two passages contained in this translation of classic essays
can be used as worksheets showing the way to a clean and aesthetic triumph
over life's obstacles by observing, calculating, outwitting and out-maneuvering
adversaries and avoiding battles.

This collection includes a wide range of Bateson's early journal publications
and speeches, and including his metalogues (dialogues with his daughter),
his theory of schizophrenia, and his research on aquatic mammals and on
semantics.

The advances in spatial and network concepts of economics, and the technological
innovations that power them, have wide-ranging implications for international
trade and the global economy.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe:
The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995.

Darwinian selection alone cannot explain the complex systems and general
laws that define the universe; another force, the emergence of self-organized
order from chaos, is a concept we are just beginning to understand and
apply to complex social and economic phenomena.

Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The Rise
of Neo-Biological Civilization. New York: Addison Wesley, 1994. (Also
available on the Internet.)

In the new era, robust adaptability and autonomy of living organisms
becomes a model for human systems from telecommunications to the global
economy to drug design.

In this landmark book-initiating the concept of paradigm shift-the author
hypothesizes that scientific progress does not come only by evolution,
but by a series of interludes of gradual progress punctuated by intellectually
violent revolutions.

Exploring the counterintuitive world of decentralized systems and self-organizing
phenomena, Resnick examines how people resist decentralized ideas and proposes
an innovative computer language that helps develop powerful new ways of
thinking.

Toffler, Alvin. Powershift: Knowledge,
Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. New York: Bantam
Books, 1990. Also available on audio cassette.

The next century will herald a new system of high-tech wealth creation,
and a tremendous upheaval as a new system, with workers owning the "tools
of production" in the form of knowledge, become the "prosumers"
who define the market.

Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave.
New York: Morrow, 1980.

The second of Toffler's trilogy, Third Wave traces the nature and rate
of social change from the Agricultural Era of the hunter-gatherers through
the second wave or industrial revolution, to the third wave-the information
revolution in which we are now participating-and its implications on human
production and society.

Waldrop, Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging
Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992.

Waldrop traces the development of the emerging science of complexity
and its implications to our organizational and economic systems through
a multi-disciplinary focus, from biology to mathematics to emergent economic
systems.

Learning and Organizations

Axelrod explores the balance between egoism and social interaction and
its implication in our changing social structures in areas such as cooperation,
mathematical and strategic games, conflict management, and consensus-building.

The success of Japanese companies is in creating explicit knowledge
(manuals, procedures, etc.) from tacit (experiential) knowledge through
the work of middle managers who bridge the gap between top management ideas
and the chaotic realities of the front line.

Senge, Peter. Fifth Discipline: The
Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency,
1990.

"The purpose of this book is to explain the potentialities of the
machine in fields which up to now have been taken to be purely human and
to warn against the dangers of a purely selfish exploitation of these possibilities
in a world in which to human beings, human beings are all-important."

Wilson, Robert Anton. The New Inquisition:
Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Phoenix, AZ; Falcon
Press, 1986.

An off-beat look at skepticism, knowledge, science, philosophy, materialism
and 'rational science' in the context of twentieth-century society.

Technology

Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy
(Foundation's Edge,.....) New York: Caedmon, 1982. (Available as
a sound recording read by the author.)

Asimov weaves the futuristic story of galactic history in the time between
two empires as thinkers struggle to reduce 10,000 years of chaos to 1,000.

The pioneer of designs and concepts such as the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion
world map, and countless other structures that have changed the face of
the world describes the development of his creative innovations and demonstrates
how we may harvest technological advances to benefit all humanity.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital.
New York: Knopf, 1995.

With bits replacing atoms as the basic commodity of human interaction,
the revolution in information technology is liberating computers from the
confines of keyboards and fundamentally altering how we learn, work, and
entertain ourselves.

It is our essential task to transform ourselves from mere social creatures
into community creatures if human evolution is to proceed; Rheingold is
making those steps with millions of others via the electronic media, an
ecosystem of subcultures made possible by rapidly expanding technologies.

The father of cybernetics looks at the history of ideas and inventions,
some of the social and economic patterns related to those inventions, and
the innovation and change that are required if future technologies are
to serve all segments of the world's population.

"The purpose of this book is to explain the potentialities of the
machine in fields which up to now have been taken to be purely human and
to warn against the dangers of a purely selfish exploitation of these possibilities
in a world in which to human beings, human beings are all-important."

The five keys to mastery are Instruction, Practice, Surrender (being
a student), Intentionality (visualization and exercise), The Edge (pushing
the limit); using these keys, people can sustain activity on the plateaus
that are necessary until a new level is reached.

The ability to solve problems or fashion products valued in one or more
cultures is intelligence, and all people have in varying degrees seven
types of intelligence: linguistic, logical, musical, spatial, kinesthetic,
intrapersonal, and interpersonal. (In later books, Gardner has added "naturalistic"
intelligence, referring to those who can distinguish among and classify
features of the environment.)

Through fiction, the author approaches the future and the human potentialities
within it; the story about a man who discovers that love and mutual respect
are the true reasons for wanting to live forever.

Defining hypnotism as an altered state of mind, the authors take a look
at the frequency with which we are all hypnotized, how we accomplish such
altered states, and how they can effect our productivity, creativity and
overall health, and our personal and organizational orientations to future
possibilities.

Expanding Your Learning Power

Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles van Doren.
How to Read a Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

In this popular revision of the original classic, the authors describe
how to achieve higher levels of reading, how to determine quickly the author's
point of view; they present the various ways to get the most out of reading
different types of material.

Graphics can free your ideas to grow and expand constantly; graphic
techniques such as mind mapping can help you mirror and magnify your brain's
patterns of perception and significantly increase your ability to learn,
think, and create and to join with others to pool thinking productively.

Kistler, Mark. Draw Squad. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Step-by-step, the author takes us through principles, examples, and
exercises that enable the least "visual" of us to draw quickly
and confidently.

The authors identify essential types of questions that must be asked
if problems are to be solved efficiently-questions concerning the nature,
origin, and complexity of the problem to be addressed, and the resources
and change needed to address it.

Leadership and Communication

A leadership expert examines how the leaders of six Great Groups created
a 'collaborative advantage'.

Greenleaf, Robert. Servant Leadership:
A Journey in to the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New
York: Paulist Press, 1977.

Greenleaf's hypotheses-true leaders are chosen by their followers based
on skills in awareness, foresight, listening, and ability to use power
to benefit the organization-has influenced an entire generation of management
experts and institutional leaders in determining the true servant roles
of their organizations.

We can understand complex cultural data only when we understand various
Primary Message Systems-so enculturated that we are not aware of the extent
to which our responses are build upon it-including cultural aspects of
interaction, association, subsistence, bisexuality, territoriality, temporality,
learning, play, defense, and exploitation.

Applying the principles of stewardship will radically change all areas
of organizations from governance to management; organizations will succeed
in their marketplaces by choosing stewardship over self-interest and redistributing
purpose and wealth; individuals will choose responsibility over entitlement,
holding themselves accountable to those over whom they exercise power.

Hesselbein, Frances, Marshall Goldsmith, Richard
Beckhard, eds. The Leader of the Future: New Visions, Strategies,
and Practices for the Next Era. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

A collection of essays based on four principles: a leader is someone
who has followers, who produces results, who sets examples, and who takes
full responsibility.